If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You know that old chestnut, right? It’s never been truer when you talk about business continuity.
Unfortunately, a lot of business owners casually stroll past business continuity conversations, believing that their old-school manual backups will keep their business running during and after a disaster.
In today’s post, we ask a startling question: how much revenue would you lose if your business was offline for 3 hours? Read along to learn more than calculate your own cost of downtime.
Understanding Business Continuity
Business Continuity is the ability of an organization to maintain critical business functions during and after a disaster. Disasters include not only cyberattacks but also natural disasters like fires, flooding, and other external threats like an employee accidentally deleting a file. To survive during and after a disaster, you must have a plan. Too many decision-makers believe that their legacy backup systems are good enough, costing them thousands of dollars per incident.
If you’re using an outdated system, you’re putting your business at financial risk—plain and simple. The traditional tools used to backup your company’s data will not work in today’s fast-paced business environment. There’s just too much data being generated, and your customers expect 24/7 access to your products or services.
In the past, setting up a backup solution was complex and resource intensive. However, with today’s cloud technology, the barriers to adoption are extremely low. As you consider moving into a modern backup and disaster recovery solution, you’ll want to tap into your IT team or MSP to help you determine which functions are essential during a disaster so that resources can be allocated appropriately.
Key Business Continuity Terms to Know
Here are some key terms to know when you’re working with your IT team or MSP to implement a business continuity solution. Understanding these terms will help you to better understand how the process works and help you determine how much a solution may cost you.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The amount of time it takes to recover normal business operations after an outage. You’ll need to consider RTO with your team as you create your Backup and Disaster Recovery plan. How much time will you lose, and how will the impact affect your bottom line?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The amount of data you can afford to lose in a disaster. What does this mean? RPO means you must decide whether to back up everything or if losing small data bits is okay.
Failover
The process of automatically offloading tasks to a backup system in a way that’s easy for users. The offloading might happen at a secondary site with redundant systems ready to take over.
Failback
The process of switching back to the original systems after the disaster has passed.
Restore
The process of transferring backup data to your primary system or data center. The restore process is considered part of Backup rather than Disaster Recovery.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
A managed approach to Disaster Recovery.
Other potential terms that may come up in conversation around business continuity include Proactive Monitoring and Maintenance, Disaster Recovery Planning, Incident Response, and Vendor Management and Coordination. An MSP can set these up and automate them all.
The Benefits of Partnering with a Dedicated IT Support Team
If you don’t have a dedicated internal IT support team to help you implement a business continuity solution, working with an MSP would be your best bet. Outsourcing your IT support for this project offers expertise and experience, cost efficiency, and overall peace of mind.
When you work with a company like ONE 2 ONE, you’ll get a 5-star experience built around a proven process we’ve used for over twenty years. ONE 2 ONE educates and empowers those we serve and support, providing data-backed and proven responsiveness with a team support model that focuses on the bigger picture for your business.
We’re not going to push you on backup and disaster recovery or force you to move away from any legacy tool you might be using. We will educate you on why we think it’s important to have such a tool and provide the data to back up our claim.
Downtime Is Expensive—Calculate Your Cost Per Hour Now
Suppose you’re on the fence about moving from a legacy business continuity solution to a modern cloud-based solution. In that case, we have a tool for you to help you make a more informed decision.
Use the calculator below to understand what your company would pay hourly if your systems went down. In most, if not all, cases, we think you’ll agree that the ROI on a BCDR solution is net positive!
Business Continuity Made for Your Business
So, what did you think of your number? Were you surprised, not surprised, shocked? How does your downtime cost compare to what you currently pay for backup?
If you’re feeling completely overwhelmed and would like to better understand how moving away from a legacy backup solution to a modern cloud-based option can benefit your business, let’s have a conversation.
ONE 2 ONE offers a cloud-first backup without the cost or complexity. It is designed to provide a streamlined data protection service for physical servers, workstations, business documents, and Microsoft 365, all in one easy-to-use dashboard.